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The digital universe is likely to expand by 400% during the next four years. Where on earth will you put all that data?

The digital universe is likely to expand by 400% during the next four years.  The big question is where on earth will you put all that data?  Don’t count on Moore’s law and the exponential growth of cheaper, faster storage to stem the tide. The last time data storage capacity matched information growth was way back in 2002.

Even worse, your IT budget is likely to grow a mere 20% during those same four years, with IT staffing increasing a mere 10%.  And just as you have to do more with less, the stakes for properly securing and storing ever-increasing amounts of data have never been higher, with data breaches and information outages creating fines, financial losses and headlines around the globe.

So what’s an IT department to do?  Fortunately, you’ll be able to supplant Moore’s Law with the ever expanding capabilities of data management solutions that automate the processes that make putting data in it’s proper place efficient, cost effective and, most important, possible.

With new technology solutions you can rethink data protection, including backup, archiving and security. Active archiving puts data under control, it’s de-duplicated so it costs less to store, it can be deleted when no longer needed, but it can also be held for legal and regulatory compliance.  Active archiving ensures that discovery—the finding of relevant business, legal, regulatory or private information and preventing it from being deleted—is done efficiently. That means no more multiple duplications of individual items  “for compliance reasons.”

The new solutions allow you to de-duplicate everywhere to eliminate redundant information close to the source. This improves performance of the virtual system, cuts network traffic dramatically and reduces the cost of data protection.  Besides, it’s a pretty safe bet that no one is ever going to need a hundred copies of the same email attachment. 

This may sound obvious, but deleting data is the best way to avoid having to store it.  That may sound scary, since deleting the wrong thing can lead to fines, news stories and even jail.  But if you use a technology solution to automate the process and properly manage information, you can delete confidently.  Automating the deletion process is legally defensible when done in conjunction with specific retention requirements. It’s ad-hoc deletion by individual users that causes legal trouble because it’s arbitrary. Courts hate “arbitrary.”

Finally, remember that all data is not created equal, which is why the one-size-fits all approach to data storage doesn’t work. After all, putting everything on Tier 1 storage, replicating it synchronously to a second site and having a third hot site for disaster recovery is just plain costly. A solution such as Symantec’s CommandCentral Storage and Storage Foundation classifies data and determines its value, then maps that value to the appropriate tier.

All data points in this blog were sourced from The Symantec White Paper: Put Data Growth in Its Place Solution Overview.